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Two Brothers among Hijackers: CNN Report
Investigators have leads on four hijackers they believe commandeered the two airliners from Boston that destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center, CNN has learned.
Two of the men were brothers, apparently from Saudi Arabia, who had most recently been living in Florida and attended flight training school there.
In another development, law enforcement sources said the United States intercepted two phone calls after the Tuesday attacks between members of al Qaeda, the terrorist network sponsored by suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden. In those conversations, the individuals discussed hitting two targets, the sources said.
Police and law enforcement sources said the two brothers suspected in the Boston hijackings were Adnan Bukhari and Ameer Abbas Bukhari, who up until recent days had lived in Vero Beach, Florida. Both of their homes have been searched, the sources said.
The two rented a car, a silver-blue Nissan Altima, from an Alamo car rental at Boston's Logan Airport and drove to an airport in Portland, Maine, where they got on US Airways Flight 5930 at 6 a.m. Tuesday headed back to Boston, the sources said.
Investigators are analyzing videotapes at the car rental facility and at the Maine airport.
Before CNN learned the identities of the two brothers, Portland Police Chief Mike Chitwood said, "I can tell you those two individuals did get on a plane and fly to Boston early yesterday morning ... I can tell you that they are the focus of a federal investigation."
Law enforcement sources said investigators searched for documents pertaining to the Bukharis and other students at Flight Safety International, a Vero Beach aviation school.
The landlord of Adnan Bukhari said Bukhari and another man who lived next door described themselves as Saudi pilots and lived with their wives and children. The landlord, Paul Stimeling, said the wife and the children of the next-door neighbor of Adnan Bukhari moved out over the weekend. The Bukhari family, the landlord said, moved out at the end of August.
Law enforcement sources said the FBI is seeking to question the family members as material witnesses.
FBI investigators also obtained the records of student pilots from other flight training schools in the area, including Embry-Riddle University and Huffman Aviation International.
Charles Voss, a bookkeeper for Huffman in Coral Springs, Florida, said agents interviewed him and confirmed he briefly allowed two students from the flight school to stay at his house. Those men were Mohammed Atta and Marwan Yousef Alshehhi, who law enforcement sources say carried United Arab Emirates passports.
A Florida driver's license was issued to Atta on May 2, 2001, and he previously held an Egyptian driver's license.
A Mitsubishi sedan impounded at Logan Airport was rented by Atta, sources said. The car contained materials, including flight manuals, written in Arabic that law enforcement sources called "helpful" to the investigation.
An apartment linked to Atta has been searched in Coral Springs.
Investigators also said they are checking the phone records of each of the addresses searched. They are also attempting to obtain fingerprint and DNA samples, sources said.
Police also issued a lookout alert for two cars -- a 1989 two-door red Pontiac with license plate D79-DDV or DVD and a four-door Oldsmobile with the license plate VEP-54N. A vehicle registration record obtained by CNN show that the Pontiac was registered to Atta.
The FBI on Wednesday took several people into custody in Boston and in Florida for questioning in connection with the investigation into the deadly terrorist attacks against the United States.
The individuals have not been arrested and they have not been described as suspects, but authorities said they could provide "important material information" related to the attacks.
Said one source: "They are talking."
But FBI Director Robert Mueller said: "There have been no arrests relating to these hijackings." He said authorities had identified "many of the hijackers" on the four planes that crashed Tuesday and were seeking "any of their associates remaining in the United States."
The investigation, involving hundreds of agents and numerous law enforcement agencies, played out on several fronts and across the globe as the hunt for the culprits intensified. The investigation included a search in Germany.
Initial signs pointed to the hijackers -- dead with their thousands of victims -- having ties to the Middle East.
The day was chock full of sightings of suspicious individuals and hundreds of tips pouring into the FBI. Some tips turned cold quickly, including the detainment of an Amtrak train in Providence, Rhode Island, for the questioning of three men, who authorities later said were not connected to the attacks.
Separately, heavily armed police and FBI agents swarmed the Westin Hotel in the Copley Square area of Boston.
As part of the investigation, authorities are checking passenger manifests from the crashed airplanes to see if they include anyone who attended flight schools in the United States or who used facilities that have airline simulators.
After an initial review of those manifests, investigators are looking at several people, including at least one with suspected links to bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi exile living in Afghanistan who is the accused mastermind of the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
Authorities, sources said, believe three to five hijackers were on board each of the four planes that crashed Tuesday. Two jets slammed into the towers of New York's World Trade Center, one hit the Pentagon, and the fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania.
The search had an international angle as well. In Hamburg, Germany, the BKA, the federal criminal agency, searched one apartment at the request of the FBI, a police spokesman said. He said agents found that one of the apartments has been empty since February and the resident of the other did not match the name given by the FBI, so the second apartment was not searched.
Agents are taking evidence samples from the apartments, the spokesman said.
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